Pauline Marois

Pauline Marois.Courtesy of the office of the prime minister of Quebec.

Pauline Marois, (born March 29, 1949, Quebec city, Quebec, Canada), Canadian politician who served as premier of the province of Quebec (2012–14) and leader of the Parti Québécois (2007–14), a party that promoted independence for Quebec. She was the province’s first woman premier.

Marois’s parents were of modest means (her father was a mechanic and her mother a teacher) but valued her education. She attended the Collège Jésus-Marie, a school in Sillery that was mainly patronized by the Francophone elite of the Quebec city area. She graduated in 1971 from Laval University with a B.A. in social services and earned an M.B.A. from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales, the business school of the University of Montreal, in 1976.

Marois went on to work for family-support and local and regional community-service organizations, including the Social and Family Economics Co-ops Association (Association des Coopératives d’Économie Familiale). She entered the political arena in 1978, when her former professor, Quebec’s minister of finance and future premier Jacques Parizeau, recruited her as a press agent for the first government of the Parti Québécois (PQ). In 1979 she became the chief of staff for the minister of the status of women.

Marois was first elected to the National Assembly of Quebec in 1981, having run for office while pregnant. She soon joined the cabinet of Premier René Lévesque in what would become the first in a long string of ministerial assignments in successive PQ governments. Under Premier Bernard Landry, Marois controlled most of the cabinet’s economic portfolio, in addition to serving as vice-premier. She spearheaded a number of major social programs, including the creation of a subsidized early childhood day-care network.

Despite her remarkable ascent in government, Marois failed twice (1985 and 2005) to secure the leadership of her party, which led to her retirement from politics in 2006. However, after the resignation of PQ leader André Boisclair—prompted by very poor results for the party in the 2007 election—Marois returned and, running unopposed, was chosen party chief.

On September 4, 2012, Quebecers went to the polls to elect a new government amid a social crisis. Public support for the ruling Liberal Party had fallen to record lows as it faced repeated allegations of collusion and corruption following the exposure of illegal party financing and influence peddling. The province was also beset by the largest student strike in its history, in response to a steep tuition increase by the government. Despite a contest benefiting the challenger, the PQ was unable to obtain a majority of the seats in Quebec’s National Assembly (winning 54 of 125 seats) and thus assumed power as a minority government. During her victory speech in a Montreal nightclub, Marois was rushed off the stage by her bodyguards after a gunman shot two people (killing one) while trying to enter the building.

Marois’s fragile minority government was forced to put aside or water down the boldest elements of its electoral program, such as the extension of the French-only education policy to preuniversity colleges, commonly known under their French acronym CEGEPs (collèges d’enseignement général et professionnel). While the PQ continued to advocate the independence of Quebec, the government’s minority status also relegated the prospect of a new referendum on that question to the indefinite future.

After only 18 months as head of the Quebec government, Marois dissolved the legislature and called a new provincial election in March 2014, seeking to obtain a majority. She campaigned in part on a proposed secular charter, which would have affirmed the religious neutrality of the Quebec state and, controversially, forbid public servants from wearing overt religious symbols while on duty. The Liberal Party, however, was able to make the economy and the threat of a new referendum on separation the central issues of the campaign, and it won in a landslide on April 7, 2014. The PQ, which was leading in the polls at the beginning of the campaign, suffered its worst defeat in terms of seats since 1970 (winning only 30 districts out of 125). Marois was among those who lost their seats, and, during her concession speech, she announced her resignation as party chief.